Trainer Bill Morey: I'm a dirt man

It's not only trainers who fall upon hard times or suffer through bad meetings that are beginning to dislike synthetic surfaces.

Take Bill Morey Jr., for example. He saddied Bold Chieftain to win Saturday's $200,000 California Cup Classic at Santa Anita -- the first time he's started a horse over the track's synthetic Pro-Ride surface.

Bold Chieftain started at Santa Anita last year during the track's first season with a synthetic, but the 6-year-old son of Chief Seattle ran in the Cal Cup Mile on grass.

Morey, who is based in Northern California and starts horses all the time on Golden Gate's Tapeta synthetic track, is another who gives the artificial surfaces less than a ringing endorsement.

"There are pros and cons," he said in the Santa Anita winner's circle Saturday. "We have horses that just don't like it, and we seem to have the horses that do like it and they rattle off some wins. I still believe we might have moved too quick on this stuff. I think it was all designed to make it easier for the handicappers, as well as safety of the track, so we'd go from one track to the other, they'd all be the same, and the handicappers wouldn't have that track variance.

"Well, that didn't turn out. Every track's got a different synthetic. Hindsight is 20-20, but they might have moved a little early. I'm a dirt man; I'd just as soon run on dirt. Although, let me say one thing -- when it rains up north, I'm happy to have this stuff because it can get miserable up there."

One horseman who recently returned from two weeks in Lexington for the Keeneland September yearling sale told me that Kentucky horsemen want no part of shipping their horses west to run on synthetic tracks.

Translation: Other than Breeders' Cup weekend, we can expect the fields to stay as short as they've been for more than a year now or perhaps get even smaller.